Quarantine
The start of this decade has been disastrous: the bushfires in Australia, the Libyan and Yemeni civil wars, the dispute between US and Iran that ended with US sanction on Iran, the deliberate take down of a plane in Iran that killed everyone on board, the official withdrawal of England from the European Union, the ISIL militant assault on a Nigerian military base. The list goes on.
And now, the Coronavirus (COVID-19).
Obviously, this post is about the Coronavirus.
I don’t have any qualifications to talk about it in any medical terms, nor can I pretend that I understand exactly how this virus works. Instead, I want to talk about all the other effects of this global pandemic.
Rather than a very long post, I think it’ll be better to break it down to a couple of posts tackling each of these topics separately. Things I will discuss in future posts:
Is COVID a way of Mother Nature putting us in our place? You know when you do something bad and your mom sends you to your room? Maybe this is what Mother Nature is doing: she had enough of our shit and decided to teach us a lesson and show us how weak we actually are and how badly we’ve been acting. Some of the cities hardest hit by the virus are also some of the most polluted cities in their respective countries.
There are around 20,000 American soldiers in Europe right now. They are apparently here to check the general condition of roads in case there is a need for army movements. It was scheduled last year and then COVID happened and the population was quarantined. So, the highways are empty and 20,000 American soldiers are prancing around on empty highways in Europe.
Mass graves in Iran. They can be seen by satellite. The U.S. sanctions put on Iran makes them unable to receive outside aid from any country, and so they’re quite f***ed.
The British PM has openly said “expect people to die”. Yes, people will most likely die, but is there really a need to be so brazen about the death of a multitude of people? Shouldn’t he be concerned about the opinion of the population since these are people that vote for him?
There’s talk that China infected themselves on purpose to be the first to deal with the virus. Maybe this was done to show the world that their political system is the best suited to deal with such crises. They constructed hospitals in 2-3 days (insane, it takes months and months to build a hospital), enforced a very strict quarantine and managed to “flatten the curve” quite fast.
There’s also talk that COVID will bankrupt a lot of European countries. If so, they would need to get loans or sell off resources to other countries to generate money to put back into their economy and whoever puts in the most money would thus have control over Europe. Who will have the money to help out the European countries that may go bankrupt? China or America?
A large part of the population of the world is essentially “jobless” at the moment. Besides health workers, police, sanitation and people who were working remotely already, everyone is facing a large chunk of time in which they will not be earning. What happens to those people who live pay cheque to pay cheque? What happens when the economies of countries start failing? What happens when those in charge start thinking that maybe not so many people are needed in the workforce? Will this be a new potential “normal”? Will the prediction of a “useless class” of people come true?
America is now one of the countries most affected by COVID, but does not have free healthcare. So, in this time of crisis when everyone is sitting at home and not earning, not only do they have to worry about how to earn enough to live but also have to worry about going into debt in case they have to get medical care.
We’re all sitting at home, connected to each other only through Facebook and Google. All our information comes (in one way or the other) only from these sources, and while we consume/communicate only digitally, these two monolithic companies are collecting all our data: what we talk about and who we talk to, what we listen to, and the kind of information that is appealing to each of us as individuals.
Have you read Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four?
If not, read them.
Read them and consider the similarities between these “dystopian” books and the global situation right now.